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5月29日 Eyes on NAFSA (part 2)This is my second weblog from sessions at the NAFSA conference in Washington DC. (See also NAFSA's blog.) Geography and Study Abroad When I saw a session called '"Where in the world is geography in study abroad?" I had to attend, even at the cost of missing the great poster session on research on international exchanges. I though I would meet the other geographers here at the NAFSA conference, but the presenters took the approach that geography was an unfamilar area for the audience. Given the depressing statistics presented about the lack of geographic knowledge among young people in the USA, they may have been correct. I did very much enjoy the presentation on the geomorphology of Scandinavia, with excellent photos and technical illustrations. I certainly can appreciate the relevance of the physical geography for those who will be going abroad, and it was telling that Dr. Osa Brand of the National Council for Geographic Education admitted that she had to leave Scandinavia and take a geography course before she realized that her native landscape had been formed by glaciation. I worried that some members of the audience might wonder what the connection was between geomorphology and study abroad, but Dr. Brand presents well, and who among us wasn't interested in volcanos as a child? So the audience was held and maybe as they see the metro stop on the blue or orange line called "Foggy Bottom" they might wonder what the place actually looks and feels like. (Or what it smells like or tastes like, which is how one of the presenters from the anthropology workshop on Tuesday challenged her students going abroad.) Another interesting panelist, Michael Solem of the Association of American Geographers, talked about a project to connect undergraduate geography classes and professors in different countries for some online collaborative learning, noting that while the subject of geography is international, the methods used to teach geography may be culturally specific. The goal of the project was to create classroom projects where students study the local geography of both places, but also to expose the students to culturally different pedogogic styles in the process. This is a wonderful idea in theory, but as Solem pointed out, there were some practical issues in the amount of work, initiave and commitment demanded of the professors. Theory and Practice Sashi Tharoor, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, was one of four panelists moderated by Judy Woodruff on Wednesday morning. He told a joke about the American who lays out four steps to solve a problem, and the Frenchman who responds, "That's fine in practice but how will it work in theory?" This was adopted almost instantly in the temporary NAFSA culture here as presenters and people in the hallways or at the expo were heard to talk about "theory into practice, or practice into theory" and similar variations. One of the "roundtable" discussions at the graduate student research session was already planned to be on "Theory into Practice" and I'm sure that this was not the only place where a more inductive "Practice into Theory" was introduced as a contrast. I firmly believe that some of the best research available is conducted by graduate students so even though my graduate student days happened in deep in the last century, I wanted to hear what might be on the cutting edge of research on intercultural exchanges. I heard about students thinking about study abroad's impact on the hosting evironment, another about the predeparture motivations of students to non-traditional locations, another interested different classroom cultures, and much more. I've collected a number of business cards and hope I can remember who was doing what. I expect to see some new results in these areas over the next few years and how they shape the discussions at NAFSA meetings in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Vancouver and beyond. Service Learning Exchanges Though the majority of AFS participants are secondary school students, AFS organizations in many countries also offer the opportunity for somewhat older participants to go abroad to volunteer with an NGO or community organization in another country. So I was very interested in the session on Volunteering and Service-Learning Abroad: Maximizing Positive Impact on Host Communities. Martha C. Merril of the International Partnership for Service-Learning offered a useful bibligraphy and highlighted some of the difficulties in determining what we mean by the host community (A city? An NGO or local agency? The population being served by the NGO?) and what is meant by a positive impact. Another presenter at this session, Benjamin J. Lough of Washington University in Saint Louis has just returned from data gathering in Peru to try to look at the impact on the local community. He used focus groups in 10 agencies: 5 that use international volunteers and 5 that do not. The groups consisted of 10 people who were served by these NGOs, for example the parents of children served. He distributed a 4-page paper that could best be described as hypotheses and background, with findings expected in 2009. Watch for them. There is a focus on intercultural learning in the host community. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 5月28日 Eyes on NAFSA (part 1)As promised, I am blogging from the email kiosk at the expo at the NAFSA conference in Washington, DC. When I am able do so, I will add photos and provide more of a report on the whole conference. An Anthropological Approach This was followed on Wednesday by a special AFS breakfast to honor Ward. It was a very special highlight for AFS at the NAFSA conference. More to come! Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 5月23日 Issue 24. May 23, 2008.Writing last time about the Quebecois AFS students preparing to go abroad led me to think more about the reality of language borders, which are often not identical to political borders. In Nigeria, for example, colonialism lead to borders with no cultural or linguistic basis and a colonial language (English) became the common and official language. Canada, Belgium and Switzerland all recognize two or more official languages within their borders and have chosen a variety of political methods to protect language communities. With the Canadian solution mandating a wide range of official and commercial text be provided in both English and French, it is not surprising to find that translation skills are in demand in all sorts of jobs in Canada. Many countries have distinct regional languages that have official status, such as Catalan in Spain. India is another example, where, according to the CIA World Factbook, "English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 21 other official languages." Regional or minority languages within a nation are frequently not encouraged, and are sometimes their use is even prohibited. Recently the New York Times focused Liedekerke, a small Flemish town in Belgium with language issues in their story "Seams of Belgium's Quilt Threaten to Burst." It seems there is concern about French speakers from Brussels "taking over" and changing the nature of the town. Here in the New York City area we remember something similar a couple of years ago when Steven M. Lonegan, the Republican mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, tried to force McDonald’s to remove a Spanish billboard advertisement and make English the official language of his town, whose name is pronounced very differently from the capital of Colombia. See: A Sign of the Times. English doesn't seem to be far from any danger of dying out as a language and certainly is not threatened in its dominance by an advertisement directed to Spanish speakers. Similarly, the Flemish-speaking portion of Belgium has traditionally been more prosperous than their Walloon neighbors, making efforts like these to legislate against the use of other languages seem xenophobic, mean-spirited or racist. Mary Ann Zehr's blog, "Learning the Language" is about the many issues surrounding the teaching of English as a Second Language in the United States. Discriminatory legislation frequently emerges. Recently her blog focused on the stories of refugees in the United States. Perhaps the stories of these refugees now in an exhibition at the Vermont Folklife Center, called "In their own words" can encourage more sympathy and compassion for people who were forced to leave their own culture and language. But this may not solve the real fear associated with linguistic "invasions" in a formerly mono-lingual territory. Should we try to preserve languages? And how would we do so? In Language extinction, Doug O'Harra quotes University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss on his view that the world is faced with a catastrophic loss of most of the world's 6000 languages. You can also watch an entertaining trailer for the film "The Linguists" in which a pair of university professors track down and record the last speakers of some of these languages. National Geographic has a similar piece in an on-line video: Last Speaker of "Extinct" Language Found. They record the few words this last speaker of an aboriginal language can remember from his childhood. It's respectful of his origins and it documents a small relic of what was once a rich communication system. But this is not enough to preserve that system. A living language evolves and the meaning of individual words or phrases changes as they are used. Yesterday I found a very useful on-line tutorial created and maintained by Dr. Dennis O'Neil of the Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California, that talks about language and perception and helps to show why the language we use is a large part of how we organize our understanding of the world and ourselves. Learning a new language as an adult may mean never fully becoming fully fluent in all the richness and context that native speakers enjoy. It may also make you feel less competent as you struggle to, say, give your phone number in another language. Yet at the same time it opens your ears and mind to another perspective on the world and enables you to relate to others in a different way, outside of your usual context. And perhaps if Spanish and English speakers in New Jersey, or Flemish and French speakers in Liedekerke actually start conversations with each other, new expressions will show up in both languages and a new, living communication system could emerge. Next week I will be blogging from the NAFSA conference. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 5月19日 Issue 23. May 19, 2008.As we in the Northern Hemisphere approach the summer season and the end of the school year, a busy travel season begins. If you're flying anywhere in the coming months, you may see large groups of AFS and other exchange students either heading home or starting their journey abroad. The one's going aboard are mostly some combination of nervous and excited, while those going home have an odd mix of excitement, sadness, relief, accomplishment. Those past school age also may be going to a new part of the world to see the sights, observe the local culture, or maybe just to do some serious shopping, especially those coming to the United States right now when the dollar is so weak against many other currencies. For exchange students and others heading out who want to understand more about the local culture where they will be staying, I'd like to propose a new way to prepare, in addition to your efforts to learn the language and scan the Internet for information about your destination. I thank Robert C. Weigl for sharing his course method of "Cultural Self-Study" which is part of the IAIR Symposium papers that you can download on the AFS web site. The basic idea is to reflect deeply on your own very specific cultural patterns of behavior, values, customs, expressions, and family history, and to write it down. Why is this important? First, the students recognize that what seems "normal" to them is a cultural milieu, not a universal one. Second, by focusing on their own background first, which is always interesting to them, they also become interested in the concepts of culture and how they both within their Quebecois shared culture and across cultures. Finally, they have a better basis on which to share their own culture with their hosts, and to understand the cultural basis for unfamiliar patterns they observe in their hosts. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 5月12日 Issue 22. May 12, 2008.Motivation, Memory, and Mastery Years ago we published a brief in-house research report called "Why an AFS Experience Accelerates Learning and the Growth of Competence" -- four pages of insight that Neal Grove and I first hand wrote on yellow legal pads, then typed, corrected, re-typed, proofread, and published in May of 1984. In this paper, Neal Grove and I looked at the many different learning opportunities provided by an AFS intercultural exchange experience, much related to the idea that the AFS experience is one that involves the not just the brain but also the body, the emotions, the immersion context and the AFS support structure. Half of this report dealt with the value of experiential learning, summed up in the 3 M's:
We were quite pleased to find this theoretical support of what we observed about our exchange program alumni, which I believe came from James S. Coleman, though I can no longer find the reference.
There is no standard year-end exam for intercultural learning following an exchange experience, so AFS has spent time over the years looking at ways to assess the "learning by doing" that we believe takes place on our program. Most recently, we returned to the AFS students of the early 1980s, a group that, at least in the USA, we had studied previously in a before and after assessment of how they rated themselves in terms of several expected outcomes of the experience. This time, we would be using a web-based survey that included the IDI: The Intercultural Development Inventory, and several other measures that we created from the results of our focus groups in 12 countries. We wanted to find out what distinguishes our alumni from their peers some 20 years after their high school experience. Our first report can now be downloaded on the AFS Web Site, but here I want to talk a little bit about the questions we are exploring after examining the data we've collected about the relationships between international experience and learning. When we studied this group in 1981, we found significantly different results for students who had traveled abroad before going on the AFS program.
As stated in our first report, we learned that 34% of the AFS sample from 1980-86 also participated in a study abroad program in their college or university years.
We know that AFS programs generally attract more females than males.
In our focus groups we discovered that many AFS students joined the program because of the encouragement of their parents.
Over the coming months I will be compiling our findings and creating our next study report that will address these and other questions that are emerging as we look more closely at our data. I will also be inviting Leo Hitchcock to provide some updates on his research about assessing intercultural competence. We look forward to hearing about any research you may be doing in this area as well. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 5月6日 Issue 21. May 6, 2008Riding the Information Subway I recently took a blogger's "What generation are you?" on-line test and discovered that my "real" generation should be GEN-X based on my internet use. I am reminded of those many times when I have gone to some well-advertised new restaurant, looked around and discovered that I was the oldest person there. That's not so different from finding yourself to be the only foreigner waiting on the platform for the subway in an outlying part of Tokyo, for example. I remember some twenty years ago On the other hand, the time spent with my hosts was key, even, or perhaps especially, when the language barrier prevented conversations. Non-verbal behavior became the key element of communication as when my host "mother" (really only a few years older than I was) demonstrated how to prepare and store the futon, how to use the Japanese style toilet, how to bathe. These were experienced hosts, who anticipated my needs and my potential misunderstandings. There is much to learn through observation in the midst of a family, and I was keen to understand as much as possible. It was exciting because so much was visibly different from my usual surroundings. It was comfortable because the family was always thinking of my comfort. I am not sure how well I was able to think of theirs. I recently started reading a book by T.R. Reid about his experience in Japan and other parts of Asia: Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West. Written in the last years of the 20th Century, the book now seems a bit out-of-date, especially when Reid talks about the economic situation. Nevertheless, I still wanted to read this book because I remembered his humorous and insightful reports on the radio: of his experiences in Japan, of his homecoming to Colorado in the USA, and his subsequent posting in London as a correspondent for the Washington Post. I particularly liked the subtitle. He wrote this book very much for a US audience, and you can read a lengthy review of it by Dean H. Ruetzler on Hackwriters, which is also in itself an interesting account of one American's experience in Japan. Ruetzler winds up his review saying:
This "philosophy" is very much typical of the AFS program alumni we have studied in our recent Long Term Impact Study, more so that the defensive posture of "smug self-righteousness" that Ruetzler describes. In the next Issue, I'll go into more detail about the research findings. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International |
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